Why not pâtisserie?

I was a lucky kid who grew up eating French pâtisserie while my neighbors thought Twinkies and Ding Dongs were the finest desserts in the world. This was wholly the fault of my parents who were more international than the neighbors. My first birthday cake when I was two years old was baba au rhum which for years was my favorite. This is a small spongy yeast-based sweet cake soaked in a rum syrup and glazed with apricot jam. They are topped with whipped cream or fruit. No wonder why I absolutely love to drink rum straight.

Then there was the Queen of Sheba cake that supplanted the babas as my birthday treat. This is probably the precursor to flourless chocolate cakes that are so ubiquitous today and is super rich.

Yes, I am of a generation who’s mothers were housewives and who watched Julia Child in her early years. It also helped my dad was Swiss and demanded to have French cuisine and desserts seven days a week. Luckily there was a French bakery that was run by a husband and wife from France in Providence, R.I. that supplied a steady stream of treats. I can still smell that bare-bones, super utilitarian bakery now – rich with the scent of butter and sugar wafting from the ovens. My all time favorite was the barquette aux marrons or chestnut boats as we called them.

These are a boat-shaped pastry shell filled with an almond pastry cream and a chestnut pastry cream in two layers and then topped with a shiny chocolate glaze and topped down the center with a squiggled line of a flavored frosting. I think this ranks in my top five favorite sweets. It is virtually unknown in the U.S. Once when we were in Paris we spent a lot of time stopping into pastry shops looking for these. We found just one – near the Villa la Roche by Corbusier and run by the Corbusier Foundation.

Unfortunately it failed to live up to my memory in terms of taste but it was better than nothing!

My early years instilled in me a love of the unusual and let’s just say more complex flavors than my American friends were used to. Which brings me to today’s topic of why American desserts are so one dimensional at times. I was a food critic in the early 1990s and what astonished me was the sameness of desserts at restaurants. Even today nearly 20 years later little has changed. You still have some type of flourless chocolate cake, all kinds of basic fruit tarts and pies, home made ice creams etc. Yes, super basic stuff any child could whip up with little training. But what about the types of desserts that take at least a day, maybe three to complete? Ones that are filled with ingredients and steps that yield truly complex flavors and textures that simply cannot be rushed or whipped up the morning before dinner service? I mean how often do you have chocolate, chestnut and almond creams mixed with a buttery pastry shell made with roasted ground almonds? Apple pie no matter how good can never live up to this.

Simplicity of food is definitely important when you have access to the finest ingredients. Some of the most delicious meals I have eaten were very basic and I do love simple desserts such as brownies and cheese cake when done right. But somehow locked deep into my subconscious is a love of more complex dessert flavors and I wonder if restaurants and bakeries will ever return to the day of pâtisserie for dessert?

I think the primary reason for the decline of fine pâtisserie in American restaurants and bakeries is economic. It simply does not make sense to spend a few days making a dessert for customers who grew up loving pie and ice cream and would probably not order any weird French sounding dessert. A friend of mine told me he knew a woman who opened a French bakery in Berkeley in the 1980s and had to close it due to lack of demand. I have heard this over and over and over. On the flip side here in San Francisco in the late 1990s La Boulange Bakery opened up on Pine street and offered a few more sophisticated offerings but they are definitely a minority. I hate to say it but simple rustic fare can sometimes be an easy out – especially in the dessert world. I know this is a controversial statement and don’t get me wrong, I love simple fare, but at the same time complex desserts are a dying art and need to be preserved.

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As I kid I marveled at the pictures especially of the strawberry one!

I decided to first try the Rolled Brioche with Candied Fruit which has a very tantalizing photo:

I had no idea what I was in for. Three days later it was finished. I hardly could believe how many steps and days went into something that looked and sounded so basic. But the flavor was so deep and rich it was really worth it. After this venture I got to thinking about the dearth of such desserts on the food landscape in a retail sense.

A few days later there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about three books dealing with French pastry that had just come out. Was this maybe a sign of a sea change? I surely hope so.

Now if only my molds for making the pastry boats I ordered a month ago and are still back ordered would only arrive I could begin on the odyssey of trying to master barquette aux marrons.